A new OS experience

2008-04-09

Got Wifi Working on My Desktop


I have a Linksys WUSB54G USB wireless adapter which I have been using for some time for my Windows PC. Lately installed Xubuntu 7.10 but I was having a rough time getting wireless to work. After some reseach I resolved the connectivity issue in just a short amount of time:

I downloaded the driver files from the Linksys site . I needed version 4, and after file extraction copied rt2500usb.inf and rt2500usb.sys to a local folder.

The next step was to blacklist the old driver.

$ sudo rmmod rt2500usb
$ sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Added the following at the bottom of the file

# Blacklist old driver
blacklist rt2500usb

Installed the new driver with ndiswrapper and verified installation:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -i ~/tools/wifi/driver/rt2500usb.inf
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l

Installed the new module and made changes permanent:

$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
$sudo ndiswrapper -m

Added " ndiswrapper " (w/o quotes) to the bottom of the modules file

$ sudo nano /etc/modules

A quick check of iwconfig confirmed a wireless card. Afterward I edited the wpa_supplicant file, edited the /etc/network/interfaces file to add the new card and automate wpa_supplicant. The last step was the add dhclient to the begining of (and below the first line) /etc/init.d/rc.local file. A quick reboot put me in business. Hooray! I wonder if I'll ever get to use Windows on this PC. My wife might, so I'll leave it be.

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